‘One of the first modern celebrities’: Elizabeth Taylor was the Taylor Swift of 20th-century Hollywood

Ahead of a new documentary shedding light on the life and career of one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, Geoffrey Macnab looks at a remarkable actor whose artistry and versatility transcended the tabloid noise

British-born US actor Elizabeth Taylor, photographed in 1975 (Getty)

Elizabeth who? When US filmmaker Nanette Burstein mentioned Elizabeth Taylor, arguably the biggest movie star of the second half of the 20th century, to her nephews, they were nonplussed. “They said to me, ‘What are you working on?’ I said I’m doing a film about Elizabeth Taylor. They said, ‘Who’s that?’ I was like, ‘Wow, OK!’ And they’re educated guys!” Burstein says. With her new HBO Original documentary Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes premiering in Cannes earlier this week, she wonders if its subject has been forgotten by a younger generation.

Taylor, meanwhile, might have welcomed their indifference. After all, she never much enjoyed her celebrity. “I don’t like fame. I don’t like the sense of belonging to the public, I like being an actress or trying to be an actress,” the Oscar-winning star of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Cleopatra told journalist Richard Meryman. Their conversation is among the 40 hours of recently rediscovered audio interviews from the mid-1960s that form the backbone of the documentary.

Taylor belonged to Hollywood from the start. She was a child star, first becoming a fans’ favourite opposite dogs and horses in family movies such as Lassie Come Home and National Velvet in the 1940s. She remained a household name until her death in 2011. There was a time when everyone thought they already knew everything there was possible to know about Elizabeth Taylor: her eight marriages (and seven husbands); her boozing; her movies; her intense love affair with Richard Burton and her even more intense love affair with jewellery; her Aids activism and charity work; her friendship with Michael Jackson. Hers was a life lived almost entirely in the public eye. It felt like a soap opera of which we had seen every episode. Over her 60-year career, she was slut-shamed and fat-shamed, made the butt of comedians’ jokes, treated with far less respect by critics than her male counterparts. And yet nobody ever questioned that she was true Hollywood royalty.